


Too Loud at 6 AM

by Crowsister



Series: Low-Key [3]
Category: DCU (Comics), The Flash (Comics), Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, Past Drug Addiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 14:10:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14082657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowsister/pseuds/Crowsister
Summary: Theo and Evan's first meaningful interaction. Part of the Low-Key series, meant to be a character-dynamic sketch. Set at the end of Cold Front.





	Too Loud at 6 AM

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for class, spruced it up some, and now it's here after a LOT of aggravating workshop notes. I swear I was gonna eat the next person who suggested that I make Evan's accent his whole THING. Like yes, we get it, HE'S SCOTTISH, but I don't have to emphasize that any more than I already have. Sorry, I've got a LOT of salt due to the workshop process this piece has gone through.
> 
> Alternative title for this: "Same Hat? Same Hat!"

####  **Central City, MO** **  
****September 13th, 2014**

Theophania Soliani was, admittedly, not the best when it came to people. Her first love (simultaneously platonic and romantic) was a desktop computer with lots of RAM and two solid state drives, so this was to be expected.

It turned out she was even less good with people when woken suddenly at 2 AM by someone knocking on her door.

She rolled out of bed, thunking against the floor as her lanky body wasn’t entirely responding to her yet, and scrambled to her door. Theo blinked, seeing Evan there.

Evan McCulloch was, to Theo, a weird mystery. They basically lived in the same house, most days of the week, and yet Evan just confused Theo immensely. He liked physical activity, an idea that was tremendously confusing for Theo, and knew the human body like Theo knew computers. This is why Leonard put Evan in charge of helping her with her physical therapy for her left shoulder. He did have certification to practice physical therapy, which was impressive for a 19 year old. This, however, did not explain why Evan was at her door at 2 AM, only an hour after she had gone to sleep.

“Evan?” She asked, rubbing her eye as she held open the door. “What’s up?”

“Shit, shit, shit, wrong door,” Evan muttered, his Scottish accent almost making him slur with a mix of what Theo assumed was lack of sleep and some kind of panic. Theo noted his heavy eyes, his slumped shoulders, his shaking hands. “Go back to sleep, I’ll-”

“Nope, c’mere, you’ve woken the beast, we’re having a feelings jam,” Theo said, grabbing him with her left arm. “Don’t make me pull, we both know that’ll fuck up my bad shoulder.”

Evan narrowed his brown eyes like a pissy cat, but Theo was okay with that. Theo was better with cats than people. She held her ground, knowing that if he really wanted to, she’d be on the floor in seconds with a knife from his pocket at her neck and him angrily swearing her out loud enough to get the whole house awake. It’d make for a decent distraction and would work well enough to get her to back off of this for at least a month or two.

“C’mon,” Theo muttered, “no judgement. You don’t wake someone up at 2 AM unless something’s wrong. Were you looking for Sam?”

“...yeah,” Evan said, sighing as he ran his free hand through his brown hair. Theo felt like she was looking in a mirror, almost. She wondered if he mimicked people’s common social ticks on purpose.

Theo let him inside her room, closing the door behind him. She let him sit close to the door, taking her fluffy white blankets from her small bed and making some comfort from the hardwood floor. “Only share what you’re comfy sharing, my guy,” Theo said, stretching her back. “You’ll get no judgement from me.”

“From the goody two shoes?” Evan asked, snorting quietly as he settled into a position like he was a half folded switchblade — all points and sharp angles in a sitting position.

“I’ve punched cops,” she answered, rolling her eyes. “C’mon. I wouldn’t be here or tolerated as much by Leonard if I was a true goody two shoes and you know it.”

Evan was quiet a while, staring at her. She could see his eyes flicker over her face and she kept her face tiredly open, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes and tilting her head back and forth to stretch her neck. The Transistor poster that Lisa got for her looked nice in the dim light, Red’s serene expression giving Theo a sense of calm as she tried to channel any of Red’s strength into her demeanor. Evan brought her attention back to him as he sighed.

“Let’s just blast this open all at once: I used to have a drug habit,” Evan said. He rolled his shoulders back, rubbing his shoulder. “I was a cocaine addict. Took me forever to get off of it. I get withdrawal symptoms, even after all this time.”

“So, you being awake is a part of that?” Theo asked.

“A lot of my shit is part of that,” Evan answered, his accent accentuating his agitation as he dug his thumb into his shoulder. “Y’know how you joked, while back, about how I’m obsessed with exercise?” At her nod, he continued, “It’s me trying to take back my fuckin’ body again. When I didn’t do all this shit — the morning runs, the sets of cardio, the weights — I used to get shaky in the limbs. Lots of muscle soreness.”

“Okay,” she replied. “I’m parsing this, thus far.”

“Takin’ it better than I would’ve given you credit for,” Evan said, rolling his shoulder back after taking his thumb out of it. “You’re always like ‘I punch people who punt puppies’ and ‘picking pockets is bad’.”

“Hartley is never gonna let me live that down,” Theo chuckled, putting her hands on her knees. “Evan. We’re weird housemates, yeah? You’re an adult, I’m a fourteen year old pint-sized can of whoopass who gets by day to day by drinking too much coffee and being fundamentally pissed at the system, to the point where I do quite a lot of things out of spite. Like giving whole police precincts flash drives filled with viruses. Or setting their shit on fire, it depends on how lazy I’m feeling at any given moment. You’re working to be better, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve got no judgement then,” Theo said, cracking her smile a little wider. “What kind of support you need right now?”

Evan blinked, his eyebrows furrowing. “Leonard knows how to pick a group of people that don’t give a fuck.”

“Ehhhh, wrong way to look at it,” Theo replied, leaning back on her hands. “The thing that we Rogues all seem to have? We all give a fuck, but we give a fuck about the _right_ things. Whatcha need out of me right now?”

“For starters, get your weight off of your left arm, you bitch,” Evan replied. “Last thing I need is to have to drive you to the hospital because you break your stitches.”

Theo stuck her tongue out at him, snickering as he got up from his sitting position and scooped her up over his shoulder. She could feel the very _faint_ shake in his hands — wouldn’t have noticed it if it wasn’t for him mentioning that he shook sometimes. Evan put her down on her bed, sitting down next to her.

“What else you need, big guy?” Theo asked. “Look, I’m being responsible and holding my arm the right way and everything.”

Evan hummed, tilting his head. “Y’know...Sam’s been buggin’ me about getting a running mate.”

* * *

**Central City, MO** **  
** **September 14th, 2014**

She knew this is how Evan kicked his drug habit. She just wished she’d never agree to come along.

“C’mon, Theo! It’s only your shoulder that has stitches, not your legs!” Evan called from down the block, his accent thicker than she’d ever heard it before. Must’ve been the fact that this was his 6 AM before-coffee-run. “Keep runnin’!”

“W-we’ve been at this for _ever_ , Evan!” Theo leaned against a streetlight. “You said it’d be a fast run!”

“Is someone chickenin’ out on me?” he asked. God damn everything and its mother, she could make out his stupid smirk from _here_ . It was smarmy enough to make the park they were running near seem like an obstacle course, just daring Theo to cut through its trees, bushes, and _green_ to beat Even to...well, _somewhere_ . She wasn’t sure _where_.

“Hell no!” she barked, cracking her knuckles. Two days from now, when having to climb up and down stairs to get from her room to the kitchen, she was going to regret this. For now, she settled into a well-paced jog to catch up with him.

His smirk turned into a proud grin. “Good thing you didn’t sprint to get up here, Theo,” he replied, sounding too innocent and benign to have anything actually well-meaning to say, “because we’ve got another two miles.”

“You run _four miles_ before breakfast?” Theo wheezed, tempted to collapse on the spot and make the crazy idiot _carry_ her back home. She kept jogging, feeling the sidewalk beneath her feet and feeling like an awkward duckling as she jogged next to Evan. At a strong 19 years old to her awkward 14, he was much more grown into his body than she was. She was still all limbs while he was pretty damn fit.

“Gets the blood flowin’, helps me think better,” Evan replied. “Helps me keep bein’ my charmin’ self all day.”

“I thought that was coffee,” Theo teased. “Kept black as your soul.”

He paused verbally, still jogging alongside her. He hummed. “That too.”

They jogged in relative peace after that. Talking would make the jog harder on her nerd body and Evan wasn’t exactly the type of person to _do_ small talk. If they were walking like sensible people, Theo would’ve done it for him and engaged him in all sorts of topics. Like why he felt like he had to get up at 5:55 AM on the spot, get dressed in five minutes, and go jogging in the weirdly muggy midwest morning air. Or how he got his hair to be all suave and sophisticated without trying too hard. Or at all. His bed head was a thing of envy and Theo wished she had that hair.

“Hey, ice cube.” Evan’s voice shook her from her thoughts. “You’re thinking too loud. The running is so we _don’t_ think.”

“Gotcha, loud and clear,” Theo replied with a little salute. Her face screwed up into an expression she wasn’t sure how to describe: somewhere on the spectrum between confused, disbelieving, and bemused. “Hey, wait a second, you said you go on these runs to _help you think_.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you have to be quiet as a wee lamb,” Evan said. “If I wanted silence, I would just keep ignorin’ Sam and his mother henning to get a running mate. You’re chatty normally with everybody else. Seems like you don’t want to talk to me, lot of the time.”

“Is that why you were surprised I wanted to help?” Theo asked, raising an eyebrow. “Dude. You give off a serious aura of anti-Chatty Cathy. S’not you, I was just trying to respect that.”

“Nah, I just hate whenever Marco opens his mouth,” Evan said. He motioned for them to stop by a bench and a water fountain and she followed. “My name’s Marco Mardon and I talk like a Linkin Park song,” Evan mimicked in a surprisingly convincing imitation. “Oh look at me, my hair’s naturally dark brown and I dye it to be darker. Like my soul.”

“Yes, my name is also Marco Mardon and I too think I am...how does one put it?” Theo picked up the mimicking too, not quite as accurate as Evan’s impersonation. “Hot. Shit. Look, Theo, I know more about physical therapy than the actually credited physical therapist who lives in our household, just listen to my bullying and your arm will be as right as rain. Oh, yes, Evan, I _was_ just shit-talking you in front of you. Because I’m so insecure. I’m a classic archetype of a bully.”

Evan snorted, slapping his knee as he sat on the bench. “Drink up, you cheeky shit,” Evan said, smiling the widest she’d seen him smile. “We’ve still got a mile to go.”

Theo groaned. “God. _Damn_. It. You’re lucky that you’re evolving into being my big brother or I would so totally plant like. Five viruses on all of your computing devices.” Her eyes widened as she realized what she said. There was a tense pause as the two of them parsed that she just admitted fondness for him. She put her nonchalant Key persona on the forefront, swallowing any anxiety of being rejected.

She kept herself from flinching as he sprang up, watching him quickly snap his arm around her neck in an obviously practiced maneuver. Her whole body tensed, but then quickly relaxed as he went into ruffling her hair. As the two of them laughed, she was relieved to note that she didn’t feel any shakiness at all from him.

Maybe he needed someone to be too loud during his 6 AM runs. Maybe Leonard was right and the reason their little non-biological family _worked_ was because they all cared about each other. It was just nice experiencing something _like_ family. Theo could get used to this.


End file.
